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Portland’s Bollywood Theater Restaurant Introduces Line of Indian Spices

Posted August 26, 2015

In partnership with The Reluctant Trading Experiment, Chef Troy MacLarty has designed a line of three Indian cooking masalas and a chai tea for home cooks

Portland, Ore. (August 26, 2015) – The freshest Indian spices are now on their way to home cooks, by way of Portland, Oregon. Chef Troy MacLarty’s quest to find the most consistent and vibrant spices to supply the kitchen of his lauded Indian street food restaurants, Bollywood Theater, led him to The Reluctant Trading Experiment to source his custom masala blends directly from India’s famed spice region of Kerala. Overjoyed with the superior quality resulting from the use of these spices in the regional dishes his restaurants are best known for, Bollywood Theater and The Reluctant Trading Experiment have partnered to make them available to home cooks, twice-sealed for ultimate freshness. The spices are now for sale on the shelves of Bollywood Theater’s Indian grocery market within the Division Street location, which sells house-made ghee, paneer, and other essential Indian cooking staples such as fresh curry leaves, jaggery, other bulk spices, cookbooks and a library of legumes.

“Every time I travel to India, I think ‘wow, everything is just so much better here’ — the spices, the flavors. We’ve always made everything from scratch, ground our own spices and mixed our own masalas for the restaurants to replicate those tastes” says MacLarty. “But each batch of spices we received was different, so we’d have to tweak the recipe each time to achieve those flavors. I’m so excited to have access to these consistently fresh spices, harvested and blended just for Bollywood Theater, and sent directly from India to us. We can taste the difference.”

Three individual masalas, a set of three and a loose-leaf chai tea are now available to purchase at Portland’s two Bollywood Theater restaurant locations, and nationwide via ReluctantTrading.com/BollywoodTheater. Each masala comes with a recipe created by MacLarty.